"A Day in the Life of a Senior Manager at Amazon” – Is It Realistic?

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-senior-manager

by mingusrude • 3 years ago

3 4 3 years ago

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mingusrude• 3 years ago

Is this a realistic representation of how a senior manager at Amazon would spend their days? I'm surprised that so many of the activities are reacting to events and inputs and so little (if any) are related to things the person in question is driving himself.

corentin882• 3 years ago

I'm not surprised by the amount of emails the author is receiving. That's pretty realistic to me. Not implying that's good management though.

corentin882• 3 years ago

Glenn: "Hey Dave. I heard that there might have been an outage with the notification platform. Do you know if that's fixed yet?"
Ah, mystery probably solved.
Dave: "I'm reasonably confident that Blanca got it fixed, but she's still investigating. I'll double-check and let you know asap."
A successful manager can do two things particularly well. First, they keep their team shielded from distractions, so they can get things done. Second, they make certain that they shield their manager from worry and stress, by being competent, and convincing their manager that everything is completely under control at all times.
This means I instant message Blanca as soon as Glenn walks out.

The author (Dave) prides himself as being a good manager, but I don't believe that's an example of good management. Blanca has already sent an email to explain what was going on. And there are still 100+ unread emails in Dave's inbox. Maybe more things coming up from Blanca or another topic more urgent. Dave have scanned ~20% of its inbox and already interrupt its team?

This is confirmed right after:

"Hey Blanca, thanks for the updates this morning. Just a quick question. Was the 'all good' message about the notification platform? I wanted to double-check because Glenn was asking about it, and I wanted to make certain I wasn't wrong."
Blanca thankfully replies a few seconds later. "Yes".
Well, maybe she uses fewer words than I'd prefer, but she's a good engineer. That's enough confirmation for now. [...]

Fees like, Blanca isn't happy with the instant messaging management.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

On one hand, all of these conversations and issues are things I've dealt with as a manager at multiple companies.

On the other hand, the way the author normalizes all of these issues and, worse yet, perpetuates them is unsettling.

This manager had a few meetings and touch points to influence the company in the article, such as the planning and budgeting asides. While the budgeting process wasn't directly the author's fault, their careless approach immediately had real-world consequences across other projects and managers. Rather than try to correct the record, they shrug it off and make a snide remark about being glad that they don't have to deal with it any more.

The author even volunteered to be a "bar raiser" in someone's interview without reading any details, then discovered that they were unqualified to do it right before the interview. Can you imagine getting a shot to interview at a Big Tech company only to discover that they sent someone to interview you who doesn't really know what the role is? It's depressing that the author presents this as an "Oh well, oopsie" rather than feeling sorry for their mistake and looking for ways to avoid it in the future. Certainly if one of their employees made such a mistake they would have no shortage of criticism for them, as we saw in the rest of the article.

This is the type of manager I dislike reporting to, and dislike working with. They are dealing with chaos, yes, but they also gain their power from the chaos. They contribute to the chaos by firing from the hip and shrugging off the consequences. They justify it as being more important to move fast than to do the right thing, which ultimately turns into project churn and wasted effort down the road.

"A Day in the Life of a Senior Manager at Amazon” – Is It Realistic?

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